Argentina’s most influential trade union federation, the General Confederation of Labor (CGT by its Spanish acronym), is to call a 24-hour-long general strike to protest President Javier Milei’s austerity measures. 

A date has not been set, but Héctor Daer, one of the three CGT leaders, indicated that it would be in early April, avoiding the April 2 public holiday and Wednesdays — the day retirees, as well as growing numbers of social movements and groups, protest austerity. The latest protest was the scene of a brutal police crackdown.

“The time is coming,” Daer said at a press conference on Thursday.

The specific date will be defined next Thursday in a board meeting.

“It is no longer enough for them to keep speaking to us about the [previous administration’s] huge inflation figures and say we have to tighten our belts because of that,” Daer said. He also railed against Security Minister Patricia Bullrich for “justifying the assault on a photographer because he was an activist.” 

“We are all activists,” he added.

Daer was speaking about photojournalist Pablo Grillo, who was hit in the head with a tear gas canister on Wednesday’s protest, and remains in intensive care. That day, Bullrich said Grillo had been “arrested” and called him a “Kirchnerist activist.”

The CGT condemned the repression against the retirees and football fans’ demonstration next to Congress and called the government’s response “savage, violent, senseless, and illegal” in a communiqué.

CGT to march on Day of Memory, Truth and Justice

On Tuesday, the day before the violence, the confederation announced it would march on March 24, the date Argentina commemorates the victims of the last dictatorship. 

In January, CGT leaders met with Mother of Plaza de Mayo Taty Almeida and other representatives of Argentina’s human rights movement. “We have to be together and support each other,” Daer said. “We repeat our big call-out from last March 24, and you’ll find us in the streets with you.”